Google revealed in October it had been freed from a gag order preventing it from talking about a secret FBI request for customer data made in 2015.

The internet search company chose at the time not to publish the actual subpoena, but it is now releasing redacted versions of that letter and seven others, as well as correspondence with the FBI pertaining to their release.

“In our continued effort to increase transparency around government demands for user data, today we begin to make available to the public the National Security Letters (NSLs) we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations,” Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security policy wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

The letters are partially redacted “to protect privacy interests,” according to Salgado.

While these letters are merely a handful out of several hundred thousand subpoenas major tech companies receive every year — the overwhelming majority of them still under seal — Google’s release gives some insight into the types of information being demanded by the FBI, and demonstrates Google’s record of fighting those demands in court.

National security letters are secret administrative subpoenas the FBI uses to force third parties — tech companies, telecoms, and banks — to hand over information about their customers as part of a government investigation. While the letters carry the weight of law, no judge signs off on them, and they always come with a gag order.

For a long time, companies weren’t sure whether or not they could even approach an attorney to discuss the letters, let alone challenge them in court, though the FBI explicitly mentions these rights in current letters.

The use of national security letters comes with a long history of controversy and alleged abuse. Government watchdogs, technology executives, and civil libertarians have criticized their use as being overbroad, and impinging on First Amendment protected speech, while limiting people’s rights to seek redress. The Department of Justice inspector general issued several scathing reports over the years, reprimanding the FBI and suggesting reforms.

The FBI is now legally required to review the gag orders on the letters, either three years after the date they were sent, or at the conclusion of the relevant investigation. Still, the public has only seen a small handful of those letters in full.

Yahoo published three of its national security letters in June, revealing that the FBI had been exceeding its authority by asking for more information than it was legally allowed to request — including email records, and online browsing records. The FBI maintains it acted within its rights, despite a legal opinion published by the Bush administration’s Department of Justice in 2004 arguing the exact opposite.

Technology companies, including Facebook, Yahoo, and others interviewed by The Intercept have been fighting against those overbroad requests for many years.

Google’s release on Tuesday also revealed that the FBI has been asking the internet search company for what’s known as “electronic communication transactional records” as recently as 2015. Key national security attorneys who have represented major technology companies and telecoms have told The Intercept in prior interviews that this type of request goes beyond what the FBI is authorized to make. While the FBI has been pursuing legislation that would officially give them that power, fixing what FBI Director James Comey has called a “typo” in the law.

Google failed to initially publish the national security letter after it was legally allowed to do so this fall, a decision the ACLU’s Brett Max Kaufman described as “strange.”

The company now appears poised to publish more letters. “In the near future, we will establish a more permanent home for these and additional materials from our Transparency Report,” Google’s Salgado wrote.

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“For a long time, companies weren’t sure whether or not they could even approach an attorney to discuss the letters, let alone challenge them in court, though the FBI explicitly mentions these rights in current letters.”

ROFL! Really? And have none of these companies or any of their expensive attorneys heard of The First Amendment?

Would it be possible to create a company policy that, for protection of the company, letters from the DoJ are published in such a way they cannot be retroactively taken down?
That way, the action and the attempt to cover it up in secrecy is made public before it is effective.

I think this goes back to the question of why these companies are storing electronic communication transactional records in the first place.

This is the kern of the matter. I think that question has been timidly and naively asked by some people, but it hasn’t, as of yet, been raised to the consciousness of a critically large and representative section of society to actually start a discussion and protests, leading to some kind of regulation and/or ongoing awareness of that matter.

So far, I haven’t noticed a discussion, nor have I heard an answer. To me: “various laws require Internet companies to store user activity” doesn’t really answer the question. It would be like taking “… because congress and the POTUS and decided to do so” as an answer to: “Why did USG knowingly and blatantly lie in order to 8-timed the genocidal ration of Nazi Germany during WWII?” IMO, Angela Merkel rightfully considering the U.S. to be the stasi of the world would not change anything either.

Jim said that “the FBI and CIA need to be dismantled and replaced by something nonpartisan and more efficient.” but he doesn’t elaborate on how exactly he would do that and that “more efficient” is just an adjective phrase. I think Jim is not taking into consideration that it was U.S. IT companies (now all affiliated as NSA branches) the ones that empowered the NSA to redefine itself by adopting their “New Collection Posture”: “know it all, collect it all, partner it all and exploit it all, … ” (TM)

There is a very important technological aspect relating to this matter that enables and empowers companies to do such things. If you ask those kinds of people “why do you do so?” they would answer to you “because we (technically) can” and you can’t do sh!t about it. It is like asking politicians to stop lying or fish why is it swimming in water (they don’t even get those questions because they are part of the existential assumptions of their being).

I am a tech monkey myself who had had to live in police states twice and I am old enough to tell you that I saw this coming. When I would tell people all that Snowden said by 15 years before, people would tell me “I was crazy” and would even stop relating to me. I find actually sad that not so many tech people actually rebel against the status quo and embrace what is called “paranoid computing”. There are many ways in which what the NSA does can be rendered futile, useless; but most people in society and technical folks apparently are scared of talking truth to power or have become cynical about it all.

“We the people” (including theIntercept) talk about the NSA and politicians as if we were teenagers who just discovered their parents had been reading their journals all along. There is a sense of powerless submission in our tone, which some of us even call “being responsible” and such b#llsh!t.

Basically, we Mathematicians and Physicists invented the Internet to seamlessly, easily communicate, share thoughts. But as many of the worst of examples of Murphy’s Law, the naivety of such “intentions” has been drastically corrupted by business and politics. Another example of a societal technology that ended up being abused to unimagined extents, was the sacrament of penance. Christians used to pray like Jewish and Muslim people (just to “another God”). It was Celtic monks the ones that started to share their spiritual thoughts as a hippie kind of thing (in those times that must have felt like helping one another while masturbating). The spiritual Intersubjective connections (illusive, yet inescapably intersubjective) you establish with “God” while praying was totally redefined by Celtic monks. You may argue that there isn’t anything wrong with “helping one another while masturbating” as long as people choose to do so on their own free will, do not abuse minors and are not doing any harm to anybody, anything . . . but the Catholic Church saw the “potential” of that as a technology of emotional and spiritual harassment, persecution and ultimately control; making mandatory the sacrament of penance along structures of control. It was not people doing it with their friends for whatever reason they chose, but being forced “by laws determined by God” to regularly tell your local priest about your “sins” and “transgressions” “in perfect and absolute contrition” . . . with what we know believe to be all their “obscurantism” those people had it easier, They were being forced to “relinquish” their privacy “for their own spiritual welfare”. Now we don’t even have privacy to begin with. People starting hating that kind of harassment to an extent that they first started the Protestant Reformation and later celebrated the birth of a pseudo-science by such an impostor as Freud who took the influence over our minds away from the Church and make psychologists take over. Currently USG is #1 employer of psychology graduates, who help USG with torture and harassment, persecution . . . you can call that “progress” if it make you feel better. As (progressive psychologist) Seth Harber has pointed out U.S. psychologists have abandoned their seemingly paternalistic tones for an increasingly societally punishing and controlling one and the U.S. and Israeli government are now openly made official their new era McCarthysm

nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html
~
Alexander Solzhenitsyn told us how he was able to write his masterful, Nobel prize wining novels from gulags in Siberia, even while critically ill in hospitals under acute persecution on a personal level during the Stalinist era. He told us he kept his thoughts and notes, drafts to himself, never telling anyone, not even his best friends. That is, even in those times under such extreme circumstances someone like Solzhenitsyn could avail himself of that thing they used to call “privacy”.

I told you about the technical aspects of it and with those anecdotes I think I am close to have an answer to the question of why do they do such things. I thing USG wants to redefine itself as some sort of global Catholic Church of the worst kind. At least the Catholic Church was eminently open even carnavalesque about their b#llsh!t. They had the spine and brains to mind to the chapter and paragraphs their eminently open Index Librorum Prohibitorum which many companies were in good business selling ( people knew exactly what to read ;-)). They didn’t have secret courts, ruled by secret judges, based on secret laws which interpretations are secret . . . again, you can call that “progress” if you want

Unless I miss my guess The Intercept will also establish a repository (keep copies), of not just these NSLs – but any others they can get.

Ed’s conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey yesterday showed the PRISM slide again, and that always implied many of the same companies mentioned here willingly participate in Big Brother’s mass surveillance. Maybe we’ll eventually learn national security letters were used to compel some of that participation, but I’d bet some were also just eager to please – and told it would always remain secret.
I began following Jack because of his Q&A with Ed yesterday, gaining new respect for him and TWTR. I should probably buy a few more shares – and maybe some Square (also a JD company).
Pssst: Word on the Street is Jack wasn’t invited to President-elect Trump’s big tech sector CEO’s meeting today. We know the president-elect likes TWTR though, and uses it frequently.

Robotics companies FUNDED BY the Department Of Defense and the latest one Google bought designs robotics FOR the Department Of Defense. Google is buying up all of these big military robotics companies. GOOGLE HAS JOINED THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!

So why the ruse?
This Google ‘wet-dream’ headline puts public pressure on EU privacy regulators to back-off!
The other explanation is to identify and track Drudge readers then sell off their data.

Mark Thompson, President & CEO of The New York Times:
“As for the digital giants, I believe they need to think hard about transparency and accountability. Their ad tech and ad networks help make fake news so lucrative..”

Google’s Internet dragnet is still growing but at a cost of using extreme measures. From their perspective, they have no choice no longer being able to write legislation at the White House.

Hopefully this example shows how original copyrighted news is biased and sensationalized to fit an agenda.
The solution is simple: only allow links which preserve the authors intent by using the publishered title. Otherwise its opinion at best and fake news at worst.

It would be a landmark case, if Financial Times would sue for disparagement of their highly-esteemed reputation.

Background: I read Drudge dailyand did not vote for either candidate. But the fake news had its birth in Drudge now assisted by Google/Facebook advertising networks.

The recent DDoS attacks on managed DNS provider Dyn, which knocked out top websites like Spotify, Amazon and Twitter, has forced lawmakers to search for answers to the problem of inherently insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as webcams, DVR, printers and routers. We really need to secure our home network as well. May be a VPN could help us to hide our Actual location, i have searched a lot of VPN’s but I found PureVPN in term of services & Ivacy (really cheap) are best. I hope this will hide our activities as well from these kinda govt Surveillance

Good work and I enjoyed the comments in this thread, especially Bill’s!

I know this may be OT, but I really want to know if anyone knows what is going on about this. I was that Greg Palast had an article on his site about pipeline monitoring equipment — but the link given only gave a page not found error. I have his site bookmarked so I also tried going directly there – but also only got a file not found error.

Not quite I don’t think, but some are definitely close. If they could cozy up to the war criminal agency that is the nsa and war criminal coward rogers then they probably would. Oh right, that must be what the advertisement sleight of hand is all about on fb.

I think this goes back to the question of why these companies are storing electronic communication transactional records in the first place. It’s certainly worthwhile to challenge the legality of what the FBI can and cannot do, but it seems as though individuals have a much greater chance of pressuring companies to not store such information than we do of pressuring the FBI to not pursue the information.

Thank you so much for reading and commenting. I think you do certainly make an interesting point about a big debate that goes on for technology companies: what do we need to store in order to satisfy our customers and their desire for goods and services? And how much of that can we take out of our own hands? This question has different answers for different companies. Of course, Google runs on data–so they have a lot stored up. Therefore, if you want a company that does not retain your information, going to Apple or Protonmail might be preferable.

It will be interesting to see what companies do in light of the new administration.

National security letters are illegitimate per se. Screw this type of police state crap. If these letters were used very rarely — say once every few years — they could gain legitimacy. But absent that, they should be outlawed and would be unconstitutional if we had an honest judiciary with brave judges instead of corrupt cowardly fascists.

The other night I got drunk and, for fun, repeat-dialed AT&T, each time pretending to set up various services but then asking “what is Hemisphere?” just to see how they’re trained to react. Some had no idea what it is, some avoided the topic, and one actually defended it.

A few Iphone 6 apple support staff know Tom Drake worked at an Apple store in Bethesda Maryland after being framed by the Department of Justice. In 2011 Eric Holder walked into that Apple Store checking out the new iphones in Bethesda Maryland with his security detail. Thomas Drake was working at the Apple store that day about a month before he was to go on trial for false charges based on FBI fabricated evidence planted at the scen the day of the raid on his home…

“I’m Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency official who’s been in the news,” Mr. Drake told Mr. Holder

“Do you know why they have come after me?” he asked the attorney general.

Mr. Holder replied: “Yes, I do.”

I remember reading a book called “the sovereign state of ITT” following in part the career of Harold Geneen ITT chief from 1959 to 1977…

“This book was one of a spate of early-70s books that promoted the thesis that multinational corporations were taking over the traditional prerogatives and functions of national governments…Although as Sampson’s book shows ITT has used other means of redress to defend its own business interests from nationalisation, that have not been confined to the courts. These have ranged from supporting the 1930s military takeover by General Franco in Spain, investing in Hitler’s war machine throughout World War II, and funding a CIA-backed coup led by General Pinochet in Chile 1973…”

The Sovereign State of ITT
by Anthony Sampson
ITT rocketed onto the first page when Dita Beard’s memo leaked the corporation’s attempt to bribe the Nixon Administration. That’s just the tip; this book reveals the iceberg.

quote”But absent that, they should be outlawed and would be unconstitutional if we had an honest judiciary with brave judges instead of corrupt cowardly fascists.”
They WERE ruled “unconstitutional. In 2013.

quote”Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California granted EFF’s petition, declaring that 18 U.S.C. § 2709 and parts of 18 U.S.C. § 3511 were unconstitutional. Judge Illston held that the statute’s gag provision failed to incorporate necessary First Amendment procedural requirements designed to prevent the imposition of illegal prior restraints. Judge Illston also ruled that the statute was unseverable and that the entire statute, also including the underlying power to obtain customer records, was unenforceable.”unquote